In that light, great customer service is not really a difficult thing to achieve. But it is important to align the business processes with the consumer, so customer service becomes an integral part of the brand. We’ll take that idea forward here.

Service, Brand and all those Intangibles

Customer service deals with the human side of an organization. Feelings, emotions, perceptions, behavior, understanding – all those things that matter, but you can’t quite affix a number to. Intangibles that you just can’t plot on your weekly reports. And that is exactly the reason why they are so difficult for most businesses to visualize and implement.

But if you can’t measure it, how do you make customer service an organization-wide goal?

The Problem: Putting it on a Graph

That is where it gets tough. It’s easy to wake up one morning and decide to make “customer service” a business priority. But actually getting on the hot seat and showing progress? That’s quite another. How do you bring “emotions” into your product? How do you make your customer feel like part of your business? How do you strategize, measure and grow the customer-focus into an organization wide philosophy?

To start off, you need to be able to Tangiblize the Intangible. And to be fair, this is going to be a challenge. And playing that challenge right is the difference between brands that consumers love and brands that hide in the inconspicuous back shelf in your local super-market.

Getting a hold and “Tangibilizing” the Intangibles

Almost every time we have a support experience that we love, it has something to do with how we perceive the support rep on the other side of the table. Probably the nice lady at the phone company patiently listened to your billing issues. Or the flight attendent managed to wrestle a seat for you in the next flight. Or the waiter at the restaurant could actually explain the dish to you.

Sensitivity, attitude, tone, knowledge , understanding, tact, guidance. Little emotions that are a big deal. And every one of these customer service love story is made up of two fundamental elements: the Process and the Person.

A lot of personal warmth blocked out by rigid processes is just as bad as a nice flexible organization with a Charles Manson for a support rep.

Almost every business which has nailed the customer service game right, has one thing in common: the perfect blend between the intangible personal warmth of every service rep, and the structured surety of set processes.

The difference between a Killer Service and a Service Killer

That makes just two dimensions to create that killer customer service. The procedural dimension that consists of established systems and procedures to deliver products and services, and the personal dimension is how service providers use attitudes, behaviors and verbal skills and interact with customers.

If you graphed a support desk on these axes, the quadrant it ends up in tells you the customer focus in that company.

The Customer Service Chart

When personal as well as procedural dimensions are low, the customer service essentially says : “I don’t care. No Soup for You!”. When the personal dimension is bad but the procedural dimension is good, the customer service is saying – “You are number 89312. And we will process you. Some day!”.

A high rank on the personal dimension and poor procedural score says – “We are trying hard, but we don’t know what we are doing. Please stay on the line and a support rep will be with you shortly”.

The last quadrant, the one where we want to be, when both procedural and personal dimensions are good, the service is saying – “We care and we deliver. Would you like me to super-size that, by the way?”.

The company which has support processes in place which blend in the ‘intangible’ personal dimensions is the company that will have the upper hand. Empowering employees to take decisions on service issues themselves is an example of this. We talked about a company which did exactly this on our blog before – Zappos. Zappos’ customer service is legendary, and is the result of a planned, concerted effort to combine the tangible and the intangible.

The Customer Service Quadrant is a good place to start if you want to evaluate your business’s support processes before ramping them up with a dash of personality.

You care for your customers. It’s time to let your customers know how much.

Being able to provide the best customer service ever is something that every company should build and strengthen. Analyzing the type of service that we give and empowering our employees to provide the best service will surely make your business a hit!

Customer satisfaction is essential to any business and the key is always listening to our customers so as to be able to show we care and hence deliver on time. Feedback tools like Geteco have been circulating the market recently that enable for real time customer feedback straight to management in which managers can respond immediately. A cycle like this enables a much better 1 on 1 interaction with customers and getting to know them much better and thus delivery of better service come hand in hand.

Sharon Linth

Customer satisfaction is essential to any business and the key is always listening to our customers so as to be able to show we care and hence deliver on time. Feedback tools like Geteco have been circulating the market recently that enable for real time customer feedback straight to management in which managers
can respond immediately. A cycle like this enables a much better 1 on 1 interaction with customers and getting to know them much better and thus delivery of better service come hand in hand.